sjTasks vs Basecamp
Basecamp and sjTasks both charge one flat price. The difference is in who you can bring in and what a task holds.
Here your clients are never counted, on any plan. A task carries its estimate, its hours, its files and its notes. And the email you get is the update itself, so you can answer it without signing in.
What your team gets with sjTasks
Your client can use it on day one
Invite them by email. They choose a name and a password, and they are in. They see the projects you gave them and nothing else of yours. They read, write notes, and can answer by replying to an email. Guests are free and never counted, on every plan, Free included.
Basecamp counts every person you add, clients included: 5 on Free and 20 on Freelancer. Unlimited people start at Studio, $59 a month.
One price, and nobody to call
A flat monthly price, and on every paid plan adding a person never changes it. You sign up, choose a plan in Billing, and cancel any time. The Free plan takes no card and does not expire.
Basecamp is flat-priced too. Its top plan, Unlimited at $299 a month, is billed annually only.
The email carries the work
An email from sjTasks says what happened: the note in full, the brief of a task handed to you, each change on its own line. A daily status each morning and a weekly summary. You can read your day without signing in, and what only concerns the watchers stays in the app, so the inbox stays quiet.
Reply by email, send work by email
Reply to any email about a task and your reply becomes a note on it. Forward a client’s email to a project’s address and it becomes a task, with the attachments on it.
Files live on the work
The brief, the photo and the signed contract sit on the task they belong to, each shown as a picture. Up to 2 GB a file on every plan. Nobody scrolls back through a thread to find one.
Estimates and hours on every task
Time tracking is on every plan, Free included: one switch in Team settings, and every task takes an estimate and the hours logged against it. The report that sets hours against estimates, by person and project, is on every plan too.
On Basecamp, project templates start at Studio and time tracking at Pro, $99 a month.
Each person sees what they need
Access is set per person: the whole team, named projects, or every project of one client. A field worker sees only the jobs assigned to them, finishes them, leaves notes and photos, and logs hours. Field workers are on every plan, and on Free they count among its 5 people.
Your data leaves when you want it to
An admin can export the whole team at any time: the data, the notes, the time, and the files, up to 5 GB; past that, we send the files another way. If a plan ends, the team goes back to Free with everything in it, and the export keeps working.
Where they differ
| Topic | Basecamp | sjTasks |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat, stepped by projects, storage and users: a Free plan with one project, Freelancer at $25 a month, Studio at $59, Pro at $99, and Unlimited at $299 a month billed annually. | Flat, and stepped by room: Standard at $35 a month for 25 active projects and 50 GB, Unlimited at $119 for as many active projects as you like and 250 GB. Unlimited people on every paid plan. |
| Clients and guests | Counted. Their page says every person you add is counted toward the user limit — 5 on Free, 20 on Freelancer — and that Studio and above have unlimited users. | Never counted. Guests — your clients — are free and unlimited on every plan, including Free. |
| Features by tier | The core tools are on every package. Several tools per project and project templates start at Studio, time tracking at Pro, and enhanced admin features at Unlimited. | Every plan has every feature, templates and time logging included. The time report is on every plan too. |
| Free plan or trial | Both. A Free plan with one project, 1 GB and up to 5 users, and a 30-day trial of each paid plan, 45 days on Unlimited, with no card. | A Free plan with every feature — 5 people, 2 active projects, 1 GB. No card, and it does not expire. |
| 10 people and 20 clients | 30 counted users, past the 20-user cap on Freelancer, so Studio is the smallest fit: $59 a month, with up to 10 active projects. Time tracking, or more than 10 projects, means Pro at $99. | Standard, $35 a month: all ten on it, the 20 clients uncounted, 25 active projects, hours logged on every task, and the time report included. |
Plan by plan
Their five plans, each beside the smallest of ours that holds as many people and active projects. Their numbers are from their pricing page. Every plan of ours can be paid month to month.
| Theirs | Price | People | Active projects | Storage | Ours | Price | People | Active projects | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5 | 1 | 1 GB | Free | $0 | 5 | 2 | 1 GB |
| Freelancer | $25 a month | 20 | 3 | 5 GB | Standard | $35 a month, $29 paid yearly | Unlimited | 25 | 50 GB |
| Studio | $59 a month | Unlimited | 10 | 25 GB | Standard | $35 a month, $29 paid yearly | Unlimited | 25 | 50 GB |
| Pro | $99 a month | Unlimited | 25 | 100 GB | Standard | $35 a month, $29 paid yearly | Unlimited | 25 | 50 GB |
| Unlimited | $299 a month, billed annually | Unlimited | Unlimited | 1,000 GB | Unlimited | $119 a month, $99 paid yearly | Unlimited | Unlimited | 250 GB |
Where Basecamp fits better
If your projects are mostly conversation — message boards, group chat and automatic check-ins — Basecamp is built around that.
Also on every plan
- Ask a question in plain words — “what is late for Jane this week” — and get the list back; ask how something works and get the answer from the guide.
- A board, a list and a calendar of the same project.
- Project templates: four to start from, or save any project of yours as one.
- Subtasks that are real tasks, with their own owner, date and estimate; one can block its parent.
- Tasks that arrive by email, a project's news in a Slack channel, and notifications you can reply to.
- A project connected to a Gitea repository: a task with the right tag opens an issue, its state comes back, and a developer chooses line by line what a client sees.
- Almost nothing is destroyed: work is canceled, projects are archived, and what an admin deletes waits 30 days in a trash.
Try it on a real project
The Free plan is every feature, your clients invited as guests at no charge, and no card. Pay only when you outgrow the room.
Start free — no card neededBasecamp’s prices and plan details were read from their pricing page on 2026-09-25 and may have changed since; anything that page did not say is left out rather than guessed. Ours are on our pricing page. Basecamp is the name of a product that is not ours.